Tweeps 2.0 in the review queue!

Thu, 2010-05-20 11:45 — David Sinclair

Last night I submitted version 2.0 of Tweeps, my new iPhone OS app to easily manage Twitter accounts, to Apple for review prior to appearing in the App Store. I have no idea how long it'll take Apple to review and approve it, but I'd anticipate it being available sometime next week. Follow the Dejal RSS feed or @dejal on Twitter to be notified when it is available.

In celebration of the impending Tweeps 2.0 release, I've now made Tweeps completely free! This is just for a limited time, so go get Tweeps for free now!

It's been about two months since Tweeps 1.0 was released. The 2.0 update includes a number of changes, the main one being native support for iPad, which is why I think it deserves the 2.0 designation. There are some major changes to support the extra screen space, including a sidebar / popover like the Mail app and others use, and lots of other changes.

Another big change is invisible, but essential: it now uses xAuth to authorize the accounts with Twitter. This is a more convenient variation of OAuth, which will be required for Twitter access by the end of June. Tweeps has the same convenient username and password fields as before, but now uses xAuth to log in to the Twitter service. Any Twitter clients that don't support this by the time Twitter disables the old mechanism will stop working.

This new version also includes some fixes for iPhone usage, and should be more compatible with the forthcoming OS 4.0, though some further tweaks may be needed for the final OS release. Note that it now requires a minimum of iPhone OS 3.1.

One unfortunate casualty of the xAuth change is that I had to disable the feature where you can edit your avatar image from within Tweeps. I just couldn't get it working without crashing the library used to handle OAuth. I'll restore this feature in a future update if f I can solve this issue.

I've been working on Tweeps for almost a year, though mixed with other work, so actually about three man-months of work. Still, it's been quite a sizable project, and very gratifying to achieve the 2.0 release. I have a number of ideas for improvements in future versions, if there's sufficient customer interest, though first I've got several updates of my Mac apps to do.